From Mar. 23 to 25, Prof. Tang Xiaowei of the Department of Physics, Zhejiang University, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, attended No. 367 Session, Xiangshan Science Conference as an Executive Co-chair. The theme of the conference was "Neuroinformatics and Computational Neuroscience". Scientists held in-depth discussions on the prospects of research and application in this area.
Academician Tang Xiaowei noted, "Currently computational neuroscience is a mature branch of science. It's expected that with theoretical work and experiments, Neuroinformatics will be further developed at a high speed in the next one or two decades." The neural information processing capabilities of biological systems are beyond the level of modern technology. So scientists hope to achieve new breakthroughs in information science based on the understandings of brain mechanisms. At the same time, they also hope to understand the brain mechanisms by establishing detailed mathematical models with computational neuroscience research. Neuroinformatics which has combined neuroscience and information science together has become a leading branch of science.
Academician Tang Xiaowei remarked that rapid development has been made both in theory and experiments with massive data yielded in fields such as patch clamp technique, multi-electrode recording technique, two-photon technology and so on. The interpretation of these data and then the development of artificial intelligent systems cannot rely only on experiments; mathematical model building is also essential to understanding and calculating the brain mechanism.
Experts at the meeting believed that with the efforts of Chinese scientists, we may reach international advanced level in computational neuroscience. They also hoped that scholars with a strong mathematical background will soon enter the field of computational neuroscience.